Monthly Archives: May 2012

Title: Research Assistant for Employee Satisfaction
Employer: Reliance House

Aubrey, a junior at Eastern is a Psychology major with a concentration in industrial and organizational psychology along with a minor in business administration. Throughout this year she has been doing a unique internship at Reliance House, a non-profit organization in Norwich, CT. Aubrey’s first position title was a Research Assistant for employee satisfaction. In this role, Aubrey conducted research on how the employees felt about their job through working with statistics. At the end of the semester Reliance House encouraged Aubrey to continue her internship and she began doing focus groups with the same employees to find the nature of dissatisfaction of the employees there.

Although an internship is not required for her major, or in order to graduate, Aubrey wanted to make sure this job is what she really wants to be doing with her life. It helped her learn a lot about the field she plans on pursuing. Her research showed that although positions at reliance house are low paying, employees in the field still respect those who work in the field because they are truly dedicated and enjoy what they do.

As you can see, an internship can turn into even more and can offer you a lot more experience. Not only is she doing focus groups with the employees at Reliance House this semester, she also volunteered to help her advisor with an experiment in rating management action plans at Eastern.

Aubrey plans on becoming a business consultant in the future. She really hopes to help people enjoy their jobs more because this is a value that is becoming more important than ever before. Your job is not only where you spend most of your time but it is hard to accomplish anything with negativity interfering with your work.

Her advice to students is “Get an internship as soon as you can so you know what you will be getting yourself into in the future, and what you should be expecting.”